


see her when you close your eyes (one day you’ll understand why)

by impulserun



Series: age of miracles [4]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 06:42:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1972779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impulserun/pseuds/impulserun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, 5 times Montparnasse didn’t realise what he felt for Eponine, and 1 time he did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	see her when you close your eyes (one day you’ll understand why)

**1\. Recruiting the Black Widow**

So this is the infamous Black Widow. Nothing more than a little girl.

She stares back at him, blood as red as her hair (it’s dyed, obviously, her roots are showing) oozing down her face, her features set in grim determination.

Montparnasse hefts his gun, unlatches the safety, meets her eyes, and falters.

“Well? Finish it.” Her chin tilts upwards, cold steely eyes blazing with defiance.

Once again, he lifts the gun. Squints down his length. Sees her eyes tracking his every move.

He can’t do this.

Montparnasse throws his gun aside.

“Too weak to finish what you started?” she taunts. “So American agents are just as pathetic as I’ve always been told, yes?”

“I’m not weak,” he answers. “Just compassionate. I don’t like to kill if I don’t have to.” Which, to be honest, is not very often. He does enjoy the thrill of the battle after all. But this girl doesn’t need to know that.

“Pathetic,” she sneers, settling back into her chair.

*

“Come with me,” he says at last. “I – I can offer you a better life than this at least. Director Valjean will –”

“I don’t need your pity, _Amerikosy_ ,” she spits. The bruise around her left eye from where he’d elbowed her in the face is steadily darkening. All Montparnasse can think about is the neighbour’s wife, young Mrs Reilly, who’d hidden split lips and fresh bruises with her armour of cosmetics and lies. And his mother. His poor, poor mother, who’d died too young. This girl, this ‘Black Widow’, can’t be any older than 20.

Wordlessly, he crosses the room in three quick strides and cuts her bonds loose.

“You can leave, if you want,” he tells her. “I’ll tell my employers you knocked me out and got away. But my offer still stands. I’ll find a place for you with my employers. We could always use another agent.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asks, rubbing her wrists.

“Because I’m human,” he replies. “And so are you. You deserve a second chance. Think about it.”

With that, he leaves to crash on the battered sofa he’d vaulted over in the living room.

*

In the morning, she is still there.

*

“Is Montparnasse even your real name?”

“Is Eponine yours?” he counters. The redhead hesitates.

“I – I think so.” A pause; her brow furrows slightly. “It was on my records. In my file. I _think_ that’s my name.” Another pause, longer this time. “I don’t know. I don’t know what my real name is.”

Oh.

“It’s a code name,” he mumbles, “From Montparnasse, in Paris. My Nan grew up there.”

The frown grows. “Aren’t you called Hawkeye?”

He tells her his real name.

She stares at him.

She laughs.

“Okay,” she acquiesces, still giggling, “I’ll call you Montparnasse.”

This is the first time he has heard her laugh, or seen her smile; for once, she looks almost human. Montparnasse ignores the fluttering in his chest.

*

**2\. Budapest**

It had started, as far as Montparnasse could remember, as a deep cover recon mission. He’s not entirely sure how it ended up like this.

*

“Nuclear warfare. _Nuclear warfare_. What the fuck is with textbook bad guys and nuclear warfare? What the fuck is it with textbook megalomaniacs and destroying civilisation-as-we-know-it in a bid for power? What the fuck, Eponine?”

*

Eponine is taking too long. She’s been inside that room – this entire building is like something out of a Bond movie, Jesus Christ – extracting information from the Count’s computer for almost two hours and that is almost an hour too long for his liking.  

“Come on, Ponine,” he mutters to himself, and is almost too relieved when the brunette comes barrelling down the corridor straight into his arms.

“I’m being followed,” she hisses, “Kiss me.”

“ _What_?”

“Public displays of affection make people very uncomfortable,” she bites out, and kisses him.

*

Things to be learned from Budapest: Eponine Thenardier is a very good kisser.

*

_Several years later, in New York, 2012:_

“This is just like Budapest all over again,” Eponine says cheerily as she shoots at an alien.

“You and I remember Budapest very differently,” he grumbles, but he nocks an arrow and takes out the alien creep that her bullets missed and silently agrees with her.

*

**3\. Pre-New Mexico**

“Valjean’s assigned me to New Mexico,” he tells Eponine over the phone. “Something ‘bout an alien artefact and needing a security detail.”

“Must be a good deal better than what I’ve got over here,” Eponine grumbles. “Fucking Courfeyrac and his fucking bullshit.”

“How _is_ it going, anyway?”

“Awful,” comes the immediate reply. “I don’t care how much I’m earning for this mission, it isn’t worth it.”

Distractedly, as he tries to pull out his last clean black shirt from the bottom of his wardrobe, “D’you wanna talk ‘bout it?”

She launches into a tirade of “I _hate_ it here,” “What was the Director thinking Courfeyrac is in no way a good choice for the Avengers Initiative, Iron Man suit or no,” and finishes it off with a mournful “His bodyguard called me a _babe_ , Montparnasse. He called me a _babe_.”

 “I’m assuming I need to fly over there and help you bury a body?”

He can almost picture her, hair the dirty blonde shade he had seen on her last, rolling her grey eyes and scoffing. “Give me more credit, Parnasse, my self-control is better than that – oh shit someone’s coming I gotta go.”

Just before Eponine hangs up, he catches the beginning of a flirty “Oh, nothing much, sir, just chatting to an old girlfriend on my break, y’know?”

With a heavy sigh, Montparnasse turns back to his half-empty suitcase.

*

**4\. Post-Avengers**

“You did _what_?”

It’s one of the rare moments of peaceful in-between, before Montparnasse has to go for another psych eval session, when Eponine updates him on what he missed while he was… compromised.

It’s almost like their between-missions banter, catching each other up on what happened while the other was away. What stupid thing happened down in R&D this time? Did you hear the news about Director Valjean’s daughter’s fiancé? Has ickle Courfeyrac Jr. come up with a new way to aggravate the junior agents yet?

(He tries to keep his new kill count off his mind.)

“Let me get this straight; you took on the Hulk. Alone. And _then_ you came after me with an injured ankle?”

Eponine smiles grimly at him, folding her hands over her chest. Her hair is short and black today, falling just short of her shoulders. Her eyes are their usual cold grey; no contacts, then. “You heard me.”

“Ponine,” he says, dismayed. “You could have – You could have _died_ , I could have –”

 _Killed you_ , he thinks, and his heart wrenches. He doesn’t want to think about it. Ponine is his mission partner. He’s the guy who’s supposed to scare off any unworthy potential paramours. He’s the guy who’s supposed to _protect_ her. He really, really doesn’t want to think about it.  

“You need to have more faith in me, _Armando Bartholomew de Santis,_ ” she teases, and he regrets ever letting her know his real name, even if it does sound rather nice slipping off her tongue, “you might be the best sniper SHIELD has ever had, but no one can beat the famous Black Widow in hand-to-hand combat.”

“I seem to remember subduing you once. In fact, if I remember correctly, it seems to me that’s the entire reason why you’re here, not dead in a ditch somewhere.”

“That was a fluke, and I’ll have you know I could’ve broken out of those bonds anytime I wanted,” she fires right back, eyes sparkling with mirth, and Montparnasse has to smile.

*

“I’ve been compromised,” he remembers Eponine saying, later. On the Helicarrier, when he’d been fighting off the last of the possession. It’d been easy to let slip then, but now he remembers the anguished pain in her eyes, for once malleable quicksilver as compared to hard steel.

*

**5\. Post-TWS**

Montparnasse is halfway across the world on his first real mission after the Battle of New York, shadowing a businessman in the Philippines, when he first gets wind of the situation back home. He can’t get home fast enough, even when Musichetta orders him to stay put in Manila.

“We could need an inside-man,” Musichetta tells him, though not exactly in those words. “So we need you to stay put. Act normal. Finish the mission. Go about your business.”

Like he gives a fuck about that, really, but he stays put and does his job anyway.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. SHIELD falls. Montparnasse flies home. Three days later, Eponine turns up on his doorstep.

“I need a place to lie low,” Eponine mumbles, sagging back against his chest. Her hair is long and red, like the first time he met her. “I blew all my covers. S’posed to go on a tracking mission with Enj and ‘Sette, later. But for now, I just want to rest.”

“You’ll always have a place with me,” he promises, surreptitiously checking her over for injuries while she snores, and he can’t explain away the immense relief that wells up in his chest when he finds nothing serious beyond the gunshot wound in her shoulder.

*

“I lost the necklace you bought me,” she realises, later, and pouts. “The arrow one. I liked that necklace.”

“I’ll buy you another one,” he reassures her.

When Eponine tells him exactly how she lost the necklace, Montparnasse just about goes through the roof.

*

**+1. Avengers Tower**

Eponine has never lied to him about her past, but he never realised just how close she was to her former mentor.

They’re trading jibes in Russian, cracking old inside jokes and re-enacting old stories about missions for the Soviet Union that had taken a turn for the weird.

“Did she tell you about the time she thought she was a ballerina?” Grantaire asks, and Courfeyrac howls with glee.

“Gran _taire_ , shut up, those memories were programmed, and that was for a mission,” she snaps, but the look on her face is a fond one. Her hair is her natural ash brown. It reminds him of Budapest.

“Okay, how about the time she killed someone with a hairdryer?”

“That’s rich, coming from the man who killed a soldier with a bar of soap.”

“A bar of soap?” asks Cosette in disbelief, blowing back a lock of shiny black hair. “Okay, this I _have_ to hear.”

“I threw it at his head.” He pauses. “And he went over a flight of stairs.”

More laughter.

 _That should be me_ , he thinks sourly, feeling surprisingly detached amidst the uproar of laughter. But before there was Montparnasse there was apparently Grantaire (or Nikolai, as Eponine had known him), and he can’t help but think that all this time he’s been nothing but a poor substitute for Eponine’s erstwhile partner.

“Remember Cuba?” asks Eponine, smirking.

“We’ll always have Cuba,” chuckles Grantaire.

From an increasingly frustrated Courfeyrac; “Oh my god, what happened in Cuba – this is fucking Budapest all over again!”

No one notices when Montparnasse gets up and quietly slips into the kitchen.

*

“Mind if I join you?” comes a quiet voice.

It’s Enjolras.

“Captain.” Montparnasse nods, gesturing at the empty seat on the opposite side of the kitchen island. The blond smiles and slides into the chair.

This is the first they’ve actually talked since New York. They’d all stayed in Avengers Tower for a little while after the Winter Soldier fiasco, but then Enjolras had taken off on a wild Grantaire chase with Cosette and Eponine in tow, and after that – well, Montparnasse hadn’t actually had reason to talk to him before.

There’s a silent exchange of hand gestures and facial expressions. Montparnasse grabs an extra bottle of juice from the fridge and tosses it over the counter; Enjolras catches it.

They sit, staring at each other.

“I just,” he mumbles. There’s something about the damned captain’s damned face that has him wanting to spill his guts out. “I couldn’t spend another minute in there.”

“It’s okay, you know. I understand. For the longest time, Grantaire was all I ever had, and vice versa, and now, well.” He huffs. “Cosette tells me it’s normal to feel like this, when you see your significant other interacting with their ex, but I feel guilty anyway.”

What?

Slowly, Montparnasse sets his glass of water down on the counter. Stares at the supersoldier blinking innocent blue eyes at him.

“What?” he croaks out.

Enjolras turns slightly pink. “Um, I – Grantaire and I – we’re, you know? I thought you’d understand, since you’re obviously in love with Eponine, even if Ponine insists love is for children and neither of you will admit it out loud –”

Colour drains from his face as the gears in his head whir to life; the captain sits up, alarmed. “Montparnasse? Are you okay – ?”

“Oh my god,” he whispers, as everything clicks into place. He’s in love with Eponine.

“Oh my _god_ ,” he says again, as the full ramifications of his realisation sink in. _He’s in love with Eponine_.


End file.
